Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased, I must say, as a great advocate of education in our society to see it dominating so significantly in the grievance debate tonight. I have enjoyed the contributions of both my colleague the member for Throsby and the member for Mallee on the importance of education, and I also want to address that to some extent myself in the grievance debate tonight.

What has particularly roused me to speak in this debate is the fact that there has been an increasing incidence amongst the senior journalists in this country to comment on the Building the Education Revolution in a very disparaging way about the importance of capital injection into schools. So I put aside the partisan debate that we are having about the rollout of that program and the issues that may want to be debated about particular projects and will deal more broadly with the importance of the environment in terms of educational delivery.

I spent quite a number of years as a secondary school teacher and, as a parent—as most of us here would be—have also experienced through my children their direct experience of school. It is absolutely true that the most critical factor in a young person’s success or, sadly, lack of success in school is the teacher in the classroom. There is no doubt that that is the most critical factor. It is also important that the curriculum is appropriate, modern, relevant and engaging. But that does not mean that the environment that we provide for young people to learn is an inconsequential or unimportant aspect of their engagement in their education. On Sunday I was watching the Insiders program—

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